Tag Archives: arts and culture

I’ve been on a kick lately reading about fanfiction and fandom — it’s what with that addictive habit of footnote mining we’re taught to do in academia? — which has been both inspiring and a little bit wistful in that the muse seems to have deserted me this year. Apparently I find time to write porn really easily when I’m procrastinating on graduate thesis revisions, but less so when I’m coping with family loss, moving house, and some major work responsibilities.

Not that I haven’t been thinking about a Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries Jack/Phryne three-parter, and a couple of Doctor Who Vastra/Jenny one-offs. Not to mention the outstanding sections of my Eureka series “25 Ways to Kiss a Naked Man.” I considered returning to that one back in the spring, but all I wanted to write was end-of-life fic involving hospice care … which I know would have been good but for which people would hate me eternally, and for which my wife would probably have divorced me. So. There’s that.

Jenkins, whose seminal fan studies work Textual Poachers (1992)I have yet to read, is a skilled writer whose ability to own his expertise without appearing self-important is too rare and to be prized. Despite his renown in the field of popular culture studies, his work is approachable, readable even to those unfamiliar with every theorist or creator whom he cites, not to mention every popular cultural artifact. Fans, Bloggers, Gamers is a collection of essays written after Textual Poachers and before Convergence Culture (2006) and explore topics as diverse as women writing m/m slash (“Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking,” with Shoshanna Green and Cynthia Jenkins) the anti-gaming sentiments that flowered after Columbine (“Professor Jenkins Goes to Washington”), and the experience of parenting a teenager who met and courted his first girlfriend online (“Love Online”). Each essay is prefaced by a short introduction/reflection on the context in which Jenkins produced the piece — and how his thinking has changed (or not) since. Continue reading →

Because the Brookline Public Library is awesome (they even have an awesome box … shaped like a TARDIS!) someone on the staff ordered a copy of acafan Anne Jamison’s Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World (Smart Pop, 2013). And there I found it, sitting innocently upon the new books shelves (have I mentioned how much I adore public libraries’ new books shelves? it’s like browsing in a bookstore except you can take everything home for free!). I’ve found so much eclectic good stuff on the new books wall at Brookline over the past few years, and Fic is no exception. Jamison is a literature professor with a background in English literature and culture, 18th century to the present. As an academic whose scholarly interest is in participatory literary culture, it is no surprise that fanworks captured her interest. This volume is one part narrative history of fanfiction from its “prehistory” in the 1800s to the present, and one part riotous celebration of various fan cultures through both Jamison’s own analysis as well as the contributions of fanfic and “profic” writers (at times one and the same!) and other acafen as well. Not quite an anthology, as Jamison’s narrative is the “spine” of the text, the contributions by others dodge and weave within the volume providing alternative perspectives, counternarratives, “missing scenes,” and many a reading recommendation for the fic-hungry fan. Continue reading →

Hanna’s in the third week of what’s just been formally diagnosed as bronchitis, so between her feeling crap and me keeping the household running (and Gerry getting a cold somewhere in there) none of us have a lot of energy for much beyond work except watching telly.

Thank the goddess for WGBH.

One thing we’ve gotten sucked into is Last Tango in Halifax. Let’s just say we stopped by for Derek Jacobi and hung around for the lesbian sex (NO REALLY).

The Cafeis a truly delightful little twenty-minute comedy about the denizens of a small seaside village in southwest England. I think my favorite episode might be the one featuring the Hellboy living statue…

Meanwhile, we’re thinking good thoughts for all of our friends and fellow citizens affected by the government shutdown (not surprisingly, a fair number of museums, archives, and other cultural institutions are federally funded) and hoping the anti-ACA faction don’t get their way at the expense of the rest of the world.

The map describes a bicycle ride he took during a visit this past fall to Stratford, Ontario.

Be sure to check out the other maps in the database, as each one of them has its own unique style and story. And I’ll be sure to add links to Dad’s other contributions as they go live. Long-live hand-crafted cartography!

I have to begin this review with a disclaimer: I have virtually no first-hand experience with the type of reality television discussed in Jennifer Pozner’s Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth about Guilty Pleasure TV. This has been through both accident and purposeful avoidance. On the accident side, I didn’t grow up with a lot of television around, and (The West Wing aside) TV has never been a very social experience for me. Therefore my exposure to it has been primarily through advertisements, grocery-store checkout magazine headlines, second-hand reports and cultural analysis.

Why have I avoided reality television? My parents can tell you that public humiliation and social deception has always made me acutely uncomfortable: when we used to watch romantic comedies when I was younger, plot elements that revolved around social lies (Roxanne, The Truth About Cats and Dogs) — no matter how benign and ultimately happy-ending they turned out to be — sent me running to the other room in discomfort. I didn’t like the idea of even a fictional character’s emotional manipulation. So the prospect of watching any show that was actually constructed around such false social interactions involving real people had zero appeal. Add to that formula the heteronormative gender roles that are portrayed and reinforced in these shows, and my personal anti-manipulation bias was bolstered by political critique.

This is all to say that when Seal press sent me an advance review copy of Reality Bites Back last week I had a lot of pre-formed cultural skepticism and personal discomfort concerning the premise of reality television. And I imagine this book struck me differently than it would a devotee of American Idol or The Amazing Race or come across to those of you who remember watching (for example) the first season of Survivor or The Bachelor with your buddies in high school or roommates in college.

Jennifer Pozner is a media critic and educator specializing in media literacy. She is the founder and executive director of Women in Media & News, which promotes the increased participation of women in media creation and analysis. Thus, Reality Bites Back is the work of someone who is deeply immersed in media as a creator of content, a passionate consumer, and an astute critic of the ways in which media inform our political and personal lives — on both a conscious and subconscious level. In her introduction, Pozner describes the decline in media literacy and critical analysis around reality television shows that she has over the past decade, as she tours college campuses and speaks about the messages that reality television sends to viewers. While students in the early 2000s were critically aware of the constructed nature of reality programming — a phenomenon that had only recently been widely adopted by the big networks and was getting a lot of press — young people today have grown up with much more of the genre in their media diet and (Pozner argues) their “critical responses to gendered, raced messages within media ‘texts’ … seems to have suffered as a result” (30). “The Millennial Generation,” she writes, “seems to be getting more cynical (‘Of course it’s all bullshit, but it’s funny. Whatever.’) but less skeptical. This kind of mind-set makes advertisers salivate” (31).

The goal of Reality Bites Back is, in part, to re-energize the critical faculties of reality television viewers, so that they become less susceptible to the poisonous narratives of gender, sexuality, race, and class that reality television producers are peddling. Pozner reminds us that reality television producers — far from neutrally capturing how people interact with one another — aggressively shape the stories that are told on-screen about how human beings behave. And these stories reinforce what we already “know” about women, men, heterosexuals, queer folks, people of color, poor people, rich people, and so forth. They are brain candy in part because they tell us familiar stories about the world, rather than challenging our pre-conceptions about how folks behave. Stories like:

Romance and love is exclusively the province of white heterosexuals.

Romance and love are signified by providing (if you’re a man) and consuming (if you’re a woman) brand-name products.

Single women, no matter their social and financial circumstances, are desperate for male validation and will quit their jobs, submit to public humiliation, and accept the attentions of any man they are presented with.

Single, married, with or without children, women are seen as selfish, controlling, untrustworthy, desperate, pathetic individuals whose only worth is derived from their ability to meet draconian expectations of physical perfection and sexual availability.

Men must be rich in order to be eligible for (hetero) relationships, and their wealth is the only thing that matters: criminal records, histories of domestic abuse, on-screen abuse of female cast members are rewarded.

Men who treat women contestants as independent persons worthy of actual human-to-human interaction are rebuked by on-screen experts.

Poverty is an individual, not a structural problem, best alleviated through on-screen charity and gifts of various brand-name products.

And each of these stories has numerous side-plots and context-specific iterations.

Above all, Pozner argues, reality television programs are hour-long product placement advertisements, their primary raison d’etre being the income generated by advertiser revenue. These shows are indeed market-generated, as producers would have us believe — but the “market” is not the audience who tune in to the programs, but the advertisers who pay to have their products relentlessly shilled in situations that viewers do not read as advertisements. These programs — like most advertisements — contain the not-so-sub subtext that the best way to achieve the good life in America today (understood in the context of reality television a life of wealthy, socially conservative conformity) is by maxing out your credit card and purchasing it.

As an historian, I feel compelled to point out that this permicious blend of consumerism, competition, and capitalizing on economic and social desperation is hardly new. It’s not really within the scope of the book Pozner set out to write to provide historical analysis, so I don’t think the book is remiss in not providing it. Nontheless, I found myself thinking of potential historical comparisons and desiring some sort of historically-situated analysis that looked beyond anti-feminist backlash, media mergers, and the current recession.

One comparison that comes to mind, for example, are the Depression-era dance marathons, in which desperate couples vied for prize-money while contest sponsors walked away with the cash. As the entry at HistoryLink explains

Dance marathons opened with as great a fanfare as the promoter’s press agents could muster. Each major promoter had a stable of dancers (known as horses, since they could last the distance) he could count on to carry his event. These professionals (often out-of-work vaudevillians who could sing and banter and thus provide the evening entertainment that was a feature of most marathons) traveled at the promoter’s expense and were “in” on the performative nature of the contests (including the fact that the outcomes were usually manipulated or at least loosely fixed).

Known euphemistically as “experienced couples” (The Billboard, April 14, 1934, p. 43), professionals did their best to blend in with the hopeful (often desperate) amateurs. For all contestants, participation in a dance marathon meant a roof over their heads and plentiful food, both scarce during the 1930s. President Herbert Hoover’s promised prosperity “just around the corner” eluded most Americans, but dance marathon contestants hung their hopes on the prize money lurking at the end of the contest’s final grind.

…Medical services were available to contestants, usually within full view of the audience. Physicians tended blisters, deloused dancers, disqualified and treated any collapsed dancer, tended sprains, and so on. “Cot Nights,” in which the beds from the rest areas were pulled out into public view so the audience could watch the contestants even during their brief private moments, were also popular. The more a marathon special event allowed the audience to penetrate the contestants’ emotional experience, the larger crowd it attracted.

The heady mix of consumerism, voyeurism and exploitation, in other words, is not unique to our era, nor is it an invention of reality television creators. However, the fact that exploitation and backlash is unoriginal hardly exempts it from critical analysis — just like the fact that a show is being sold as fluffy, lighthearted “fun” escapism doesn’t mean with should turn off our critical filters.

A lot has been written in the last week or so criticizing an opinion piece by Ramin Setoodeh published in Newsweek in which he appeared to claim that gay actors are unsuccessful at playing straight (see Jos @ Feministingfor more details).

Yesterday, upset that “the internet” is dumping hate on him, Setoodeh published a response to these responses, claiming that the critiques of his original article are off base

But what all this scrutiny seemed to miss was my essay’s point: if an actor of the stature of George Clooney came out of the closet today, would we still accept him as a heterosexual leading man? It’s hard to say, because no actor like that exists. I meant to open a debate — why is that? And what does it say about our notions about sexuality? For all the talk about progress in the gay community in Hollywood, has enough really changed? The answer seems obvious to me: no, it has not.

Here’s the thing. The way Setoodeh frames the question the second time around, he makes it clear that the question is about how society at large responds to knowledge of a queer actor’s sexual orientation. If a successful actor, known for playing straight romantic leads, suddenly came out as gay (that is, in real life not interested romantically in women), how would the hitherto rapt audience respond?

Setoodeh claims they wouldn’t respond well. And if that was truly the gist of his argument, I’d be totally on board: we do, as a culture, respond uncomfortably to people playing characters whose sexual orientations don’t match their own. How much, and how consistently, we respond negatively to gay actors playing straight is another question. As others have already pointed out, he cherry-picks his examples and shoehorns them into the argument he wishes to make. He also blithely skims over the question of straight actors playing gay characters, suggesting they don’t catch flack for accepting such roles. While it’s possible that actors who are straight have more room to maneuver, I’d question whether someone James Franco (who played Sean Penn’s lover in Milk) never faced questions about his own sexuality. He was definitely questioned closely by Terry Gross about how he was able to play a character whose sexual orientation did not match his own. People speculate, and given the homophobia in our culture, those speculations are often mean-spirited.

The bigger problem, though, is that that wasn’t his original argument (or at least not all of it). Setoodeh’s original essay targeted actor Sean Hayes in his stage performance as a straight male lead in Promises, Promises, arguing that Hayes was unconvincing as a straight character because, according to Setoodeh, he’s just so flamingly gay.

But frankly, it’s weird seeing Hayes play straight. He comes off as wooden and insincere, like he’s trying to hide something, which of course he is. Even the play’s most hilarious scene, when Chuck tries to pick up a drunk woman at a bar, devolves into unintentional camp. Is it funny because of all the ’60s-era one-liners, or because the woman is so drunk (and clueless) that she agrees to go home with a guy we all know is gay?

What strikes me about the difference between these two arguments is where the burden of responsibility is placed. In the first piece (above), Setoodeh is critiquing Hayes for failing as an actor to play straight, suggesting that in order to play a character Hayes has to “hide something” (his sexual orientation), as if this is somehow categorically different from the task that faces all actors: to embody a character on stage whom they, as human beings, are not in real life.

I understand this impulse to a certain extent. We generally place the burden of embodying a role on actors, stage and screen. After all, that’s their job: to play a part. We go to the theater expecting the cast and crew to create an atmosphere in which we can suspend our disbelief — in which we can put aside our knowledge that these are human beings on a stage telling us a story — and experience that story through a collaborative leap of the imagination.

But the suggestion that Setoodeh is uncomfortable with Hayes performance because he feels he’s being lied to is where this actors-bearing-responsibility things breaks down for me.

If our knowledge of an actor’s personal life (say, their sexual orientation) changes the way we — as audience members — interpret their performance, doesn’t that shift the burden of responsibility back to us? If the onscreen chemistry between George Clooney (to use Setoodeh’s example) and his leading ladies changes in our minds once we imagine he’s gay (incidentally: why is bisexuality never a part of these conversations? hello??) then the problem is not with the actor (whom, until we believed he was not-straight seemed to have all the chemistry in the world) but in our heads.

I’d suggest, here, that Setoodeh might learn something from the discussion within the trans community about the problematic framework of “passing,” which places the burden of performing gender identity and/or sexual orientation on the individual rather than on the audience (society) which interprets appearance and behavior according to all kinds of social cues that are completely outside the control of the individual. See, for example, Bear Bergman’s essay “Passing The Word” in The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You.

When we continue [in the trans community] to use the word pass, we continue to hamper ourselves by endlessly repeating a narrative of deception, not to mention the legacy of racism, the cultural arrogance, and the spectacular level of objectification it brings with it….I would rather move the burden back where it belongs, to the observer, the person whose cultural lens and personal locations on so many aces are in so many ways the day-to-day deciders of how a person is read….passing is fleeting, tricksy, temporary. But what it takes or means to read depends, rightly and righteously, entirely on who’s doing it (112).

I’m sure there are “bad” actors out there — actors who, regardless of sexual orientation, struggle to set aside themselves in order to embody a character who is not them. I’m a terrible dissembler: it’s one of the reasons I write nonfiction instead of fiction and gave up my childhood dream to be in musical theatre. I realized I had no interest in being anyone other than myself, and in fact felt profoundly uncomfortable whenever I tried to slip out of my skin and into someone else’s. But Setoodeh isn’t dismissing Hayes because he thinks the guy is a bad actor. In his initial piece, he is quite clearly suggesting Hayes isn’t successful because he’s gay.

This, for me, is where his where his credibility as a cultural critic breaks down. Want to critique an actor you think is doing a shitty job? Sure: your prerogative as a consumer of theatrical performances. Want to speculate on how our cultural narratives about human sexuality impede our ability to suspend disbelief about actors playing characters whose sexuality differs from theirs? I’m with you all the way. Suggest that actors (particularly non-straight actors) are incapable of playing characters with an orientation not their own? So…what: hetero actors can only play hetero parts, gay and lesbian actors can only play queers, and those of us who are bi are really (taking this argument to its logical conclusion) the only people capable of auditioning for any role going?

I just can’t buy it. It’s a huge fucking red light that suggests to me the issue is not the actor’s abilities, but rather with the audience member who is unable to let go of their discomfort at seeing someone not-straight play someone who is. Which, as Setoodeh points out in his second piece, has everything to do with “our notions about sexuality,” our way of reading the actor we know to be gay, rather than with that person’s skill as an actor to embody the character they have chosen to play on the stage.

My friend and MHS colleague Jeremy recently pointed me toward this fun site on the ‘net that generates word clouds from quotations that you supply. For example, here is the text of Rosalind’s epilogue to As You Like It, likes 1-19, thrown into Wordle:

(click on the image to view larger)

Here is one Jeremy did with the Declaration of Independence, in honor of the 4th of July:

have fun wordling!

"the past is a wild party; check your preconceptions at the door." ~ Emma Donoghue